There are some other issues playing into our current situations. I think the fanatical obsession with “zombies” in movies, books, video games, and on television is indicative of this shift in fear from government conspiracy theories to the fear of masses of people as our main threat. However, in this fantasy fear world, dangerous people are given the form of zombies, who can’t be reasoned with or talked to, who aren’t deterred by less lethal means, and who only succumb to the deadliest of force. Ironically, this is actually the way real mobs may respond when the desperation level is high enough. The entire zombie “explosion” has become more than mindless entertainment. The “zombie apocalypse,” as bizarre as it sounds, has become code for many who are preparing for their version of impending mass social disorder.
I’m no psychologist, but it may be that saying something weird like, “Ah, I’m just preparing for the zombie apocalypse” to someone who asks why one has so many guns and supplies deflects the seriousness of the topic by treating it as if it were a big joke. In this way, the person who gives that answer isn’t seen as a whack job who thinks his fellow humans are going to be a huge personal threat someday. This doesn’t mean the person who gives such a flippant answer actually believes the people attacking them will be true-life zombies. It just means they don’t want to divulge their true feelings to others, appearing, instead, to be playing a game. Further, it is possible that engaging in this type of mind game is a way of building in some sort of operant conditioning. Perhaps so strongly associating the fictional creatures with masses of starving (not for brains) human beings in the midst of a real emergency builds an association that serves as a way to dehumanize those people in advance and prioritize the defense of one’s self and family.
This zombie obsession has spread to the point that it has reached, or should I say “infected,” the firearms and related industries, which now market zombie guns and ammunition. There are also zombie knives and other edged weapons, as well as specialized zombie targets and shooting competitions. While some of this is simply gross fun, it has proven even more popular than the recent vampire and werewolf craze. There has never been a vampire or werewolf shooting craze out there, perhaps because the fictional zombie can be felled by conventional ammo applied to the brain. Werewolves can also be killed by firearms, but only if the cartridges are loaded with silver bullets. You are mostly out of luck on vampires as far as shooting them goes, at least according to legend. But maybe there’s actually more to this phenomenon.
I am sure a very real part of the zombie fascination is evidence of our overall cultural decline. Look at the difference between the modern zombie, vampire, or werewolf movies and the original Frankenstein or Dracula films in terms of the graphic gore displayed. Heck I watched the most recent Wolfman movie and had to shut it off due to the huge amount of gore (and don’t tell me I can’t handle gore, as to date I’ve done 32 years as a cop). Compound movie gore with the graphic and brutal violence in modern video games, and we have an entire society that is being desensitized to death, torture, and mayhem. And that, folks, is in part what will make the public reaction to a twenty-first century economic collapse (which is what I personally fear, not volcanoes or comets), much different than the societal fears that began in 1929 and lasted until the start of World War II, in 1939.
We have lost our historical moral fiber and with it our unity as one nation under God. Any talk of morality or faith in God in today’s popular culture is held up to ridicule. During the time of the Great Depression, we were a moral nation united. We helped and trusted our neighbors and looked out for them if not personally, then through our churches and synagogues. There was no welfare system back then on the scale of the model we’re familiar with today. There were relief payments from the federal government, but that was only meant to stave off starvation. Economic conditions were horrid, with 25 percent of the male working population out of a job (few women worked, in terms of having a career). Yet while liberal criminologists always blame poverty for crime, during the time of the Great Depression and its dismal conditions, crime was extremely low and isolated. My dad told me that, during those years, it was still safe to walk through Central Park in New York City at night. There were no school shootings or cops needed in schools, there were no incidents of a man eating the face off of other men (now there’s a real example of a zombie!), or crazed individuals throwing their self-eviscerated intestines on police officers trying to help them get medical and mental health attention. There was none of the vulgarity and cruelty we see, hear of, or face today. Most churches were kept unlocked. Cemeteries were never desecrated. Rifles and shotguns could be shipped to your home via the U.S. Mail (and actually get there), as could handguns, until 1934. Hardware stores sold Thompson submachine guns for protection against cattle rustlers, and target shooting and hunting were honored pastimes. This is not the “gold old days” musings of a guy in his fifties, it’s an analysis by a cop whose college coursework was in history.
We have been separated into nearly warring factions over issues of class, race, and religion. To further compound matters, large segments of the population have been raised expecting government handouts for nearly three generations now. This segment is not used to making it on their own, or even being motivated to do so. Too, in this same population are large numbers of illegal immigrants of various stripes and motivations, and contrary to popular belief, not all of them are here just to work on fulfilling their desire for the American Dream. Many are here as part of the drug cartels or other criminal or terrorist organizations and have no interest whatsoever in being a part of the great melting pot that is our American culture.
What are people like this going to do when the funding and checks stop because the government can’t print paper money that’s worth anything? What will they do without the moral constraints that had been passed from generation to generation en masse in this country for the previous 200 or more years, even in schools, and not just in isolated pockets, as is seen today largely through home or private schooling? They will do just what a bizarre fortune in a fortune cookie my wife opened up one night said to do: “If you want it, take it.” And, like the zombies on TV and movies, they won’t care how they take it or whom they have to hurt in the process. Further, if it gets bad enough, what happens when the police and the military abandon their posts (as some 300 New Orleans cops did during Katrina), to take care of their own? And that is what will happen, especially if they are no longer getting paid to stay on duty. You will be on your own, (just like you actually are in many cases right now), defending yourself and family, and you need to ready, ready to defend them with deadly force when the moment requires it.